Making a fortune on adultery

It takes a lot of money to advertise on CNN.  I’ve been watching Anderson Cooper off and on, interspersing his show with Matthews, Olberman, and Maddow on MSNBC.  The ads that run between segments on CNN are usually paid for by energy companies, claiming that they are investing in alternative energy sources while slipping in plugs for American offshore drilling.  One ad has been running that actually shocks me.  My husband and I had to convince ourselves that we weren’t imagining things the first time we saw it.  It’s for a dating service called Ashley Madison.  Check it out, the website features a gold wedding band falling down.

The ad begins with an overweight man, probably in his thirties or so, lying in bed next to a similarly average-looking woman who is snoring loudly.  The man lies awake with an uncomfortable grimace on his face and then creeps down the stairs, while the voiceover asks if you’ve ever had a bad one-night stand, only you never knew that it would last the rest of your life.  Just then, the audience sees a series of family photographs that culminate in the wedding photo of the unhappy man and the woman we now realize is his wife.

The next scene is a hotel room door closing, and the voiceover explains that the agency is a discreet dating service for married people.  I’m no puritan, and I know that marriages can go on after infidelity and that not everyone’s impulse is to break up after an affair.  But the whole concept of the agency is gross for a number of reasons.  Doesn’t it seem that if one is going to have an affair, it is somewhat more “respectable” or at least understandable that you would meet the other person at work or through shared interests (church, school, kids, your pretend online world of choice)?  That one would go to the trouble and expense of creating a profile of someone you want to have an affair with, another married person, is just weird.  Getting a prostitute/escort would be simpler – and probably cheaper.  I was flabbergasted, and then annoyed with myself for feeling so judgmental, when I realized that CNN must have many choices in its advertisers.  Then I got outraged all over again about CNN making the choice to run ads by such a company.

But maybe I am in the minority here, since clearly Ashley Madison has advertising money (and therefore revenues) on par with BP and other megacorporations to market its services on CNN.  It’s just sad to give knee-jerk conservatives more ammunition in their claims that the media is part of the Sodom and Gomorrah that they see all around them.